To meet the basic assumption of classical Mann-Kendall (MK) trend analysis, which requires serially independent time series, a pre-whitening (PW) procedure is proposed to alleviate the serial correlation structure of a given hydro-meteorological time series records for application. The procedure is simply to take the lagged differences in a given time series in the hope that the new time series will have an independent serial correlation coefficient. The whole idea was originally based on the first-order autoregressive AR (1) process, but such a procedure has been documented to damage the trend component in the original time series. On the other hand, the over-whitening procedure (OW) proposes a white noise process superposition of the same length with zero mean and some standard deviation on the original time series to convert it into serially independent series without any damage to the trend component. The stationary white noise addition does not have any trend components. For trend identification, annual average temperature records in New Jersey and Istanbul are presented to show the difference between PW and OW procedures. It turned out that the OW procedure was superior to the PW procedure, which did not cause a loss in the original trend component.